Site Unscene

The Offstage in English Renaissance Drama

Jonathan Walker

Publication Year: 2017

Site Unscene: The Offstage in English Renaissance Drama explores the key role of dramatic episodes that occur offstage and beyond the knowledge-generating faculty of playgoers’ sight. Does Ophelia drown? Is Desdemona unfaithful to Othello? Does Macbeth murder Duncan in his sleep? Site Unscene considers how the drama’s nonvisible and eccentric elements embellish, alter, and subvert visible action on the stage.

Jonathan Walker demonstrates that by removing scenes from visible performance, playwrights take up the nondramatic mode of storytelling in order to transcend the limits of the stage. Through this technique, they present dramatic action from the subjective, self-interested, and idiosyncratic perspectives of individual characters. By recovering these offstage elements, Walker reveals the pervasive and formative dynamic between the onstage and offstage and between the seen and unseen in Renaissance drama.

Examining premodern dramatic theory, Renaissance plays, period amphitheaters, and material texts, this interdisciplinary work considers woodcuts, engravings, archaeology, architecture, rhetoric, the history of the book, as well as plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Kyd, Ford, Middleton, and Webster, among others. It addresses readers engaged in literary criticism, dramatic theory, theater history, and textual studies.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright Page

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Many others have stood behind the scenes to give encouragement, advice, perspective,
and insight to the ideas and arguments that follow. I am grateful to
Clark Hulse for zeroing in on the single chapter in my dissertation that I had
slated to study the offstage and for persuading me to refocus the entire fledgling
project on palpable but unseen phenomena in Renaissance drama. Mary
Beth Rose encouraged the project from early on, and she has been a source of
support throughout the extensive process of writing the book. In addition to
their support, their judicious criticisms have significantly influenced my thinking...

A Note on Texts

Premodern typographical features such as nonstandardized spellings, page
layouts, and press-exigent irregularities retain traces of their material production,
yet they also foreground how the production of literary meaning
is always embedded within particular material conditions. A central preoccupation
of this book, material conditions slow the observer down and
estrange sometimes familiar dramatic moments when they appear in their
earliest textual environments. My quotations of early texts therefore preserve
many of their typographical features, while also acknowledging that they...

Preface

In Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater, Robert Weimann
argues that the English Renaissance stage inherited from native performance
practices a complex and informally coded dialectic of theatrical space. In
medieval playing the locus, which produced “a heightened level of mimetic
representation,” exemplified the space of the dramatic fiction, whereas the
platea “provided an entirely nonrepresentational and unlocalized setting,”
which was more adjacent to and sometimes even coincided with the space
of those gathered to observe and hear that dramatic fiction.1 As he cautions,...

Introduction

When the Venetian Duke demands a response to Brabantio’s accusation of
witchcraft, Othello tells him a story. “Rude am I, in my speech,” Othello
warns, “And little bless’d with the soft phrase of Peace,” but “I will a round
vn-varnish’d Tale deliuer.”1 Unvarnished or not, his tale is indeed multilayered,
recounting the scene of Brabantio’s invitation to tell it in the first place as
well as how hearing parcels of it had sparked Desdemona’s desire and request
to hear this tale, too. At the center of these storytelling occasions—first before
Brabantio, then Desdemona, and now the Duke—lies what Othello calls “my...

Part I. The Offstage in Theory and Practice

In a short footnote to a discussion of theatrical transvestism in classical
Greek drama, Froma I. Zeitlin writes: “We may remember that obscene,
ob-scaenum, in its usual etymology, means ‘off stage,’ i.e., off the ‘serious’
stage.”1 Without pursuing the matter any further, she suggests here that obscaenum is etymologically linked with the unseen sights of the offstage, yet in
the same breath she associates the word with Greek distinctions in theatrical
forms, which judge tragic subjects to be more serious than comic ones: “comedy,”
as Aristotle says, “is an imitation of baser men.”2 In the quasi-classical
Athens of A MIDSOMMER Nights Dreame dwells a group of artisans whom...

Chapter 2. The Narrative Economy of Social Commerce

The “conflicting claims of the imaginary and the real,” Hayden White suggests,
“are mediated, arbitrated, or resolved” under the aegis of narrativity
and through the act of storytelling. Because “our desire for the imaginary,
the possible, must contest with the imperatives of the real, the actual,”1 we
tend to use narrative as one instrument for tailoring our desires to the constraints
of living—to the demands of social and material realities—but also
for bending those realities toward the heights of our imaginations. Narrative
enables us, in other words, to script ourselves into lived situations that would...

Part II. The Offstage in Amphitheaters and Texts

Chapter 3. Cleaving the General Ear

In the previous chapter we saw onstage storytellers using an array of rhetorical
tactics to persuade audiences of the veracity of their narratives. There, I
emphasized that stories about offstage episodes are rhetorical in form and
function because characters consciously select the material for their narratives
(inventio), they arrange that material into a credible series of events (dispositio),
and they transform the social relations within the drama through their
eloquence, presence of mind, and verbal performances (eloquentia, memoria,
pronuntiatio).1 I have argued that the power that stories exert over their...

Chapter 4. Didascalic Space in Early Modern Printed Drama

John Marston’s THE MALCONTENT opens with “The vilest out of tune Musicke
being heard,” which emanates, Bilioso tells Duke Pietro, “from the | Malecontent
Maleuoles chamber,” located somewhere offstage.1 Ferrardo, “A Minion
to Duke Pietro,” calls to the disguised and “sometime | Duke of Genoa”
(“Dramatis personæ,” A2v): “Maleuole,” as if to demand an explanation for
the “discord rather then the Musique” that offends Pietro’s ears (B1r). Malevole
then responds:...

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